Many movies and TV shows only provide subtitles in the original language as SDH (hearing-impaired) subtitles, which include non-dialogue cues like [music playing] or (applause).
English is not my first language, so I rely on dialogue subtitles to fully understand spoken lines. At the same time, I can hear audio cues just fine, and the additional SDH text often makes subtitles harder to read and less immersive. In practice, this forces a choice between no subtitles or SDH subtitles with information I don’t need.
Today, the only workaround is manually editing subtitle files to remove these cues, which is time-consuming and doesn’t work well with automatic subtitle updates or shared libraries.
It would be very helpful to have an optional playback or user-level setting to hide SDH / hearing-impaired cues at runtime, while keeping dialogue subtitles intact. This would allow the same subtitle track to serve different accessibility needs without altering the original files.
I guess the way to do it would be to pre-process the subtitle and remove all text that’s between brackets [ ] or something like that. It might not be too difficult to achieve technically and I feel it would be appreciated by many people like me who watch lots of movies and videos in other languages that we’re familiar with but are not accustomed to hearing.
Thanks so much!
, 
…
